Bookwyrm’s catalog is currently quite limited. Every user can always add a book, of course, but a lot of people will not find the button or just don’t want to do this, and so they’ll leave the platform disappointed.

To bolster Bookwyrm’s chances against Goodreads etc., there should at least be a browser plugin where we can enter an Amazon link and have Bookwyrm’s data entry form be automatically populated with all data available from Amaozon (and, by cross-searching with the ISBN, with the book’s OpenLibrary ID etc.). Of course, the user should still check the data before ultimately submitting it. In creating the tool, one should also check if one needs to beware of copyright traps e.g. in the book descriptions.

(Theoretically, one might even go so far as to create a tool that scrapes book data in bulk, but this poses (a) increased legal risks and (b) will most likely lead to lots of duplicated books & authors on Bookwyrm, which for lack of an easy merging tool would be a real pain – the many existing duplicates are already annoying. Edit: And, as others have pointed out, there are a lot of fake & crap books on Amazon, so that indiscriminate scraping would flood Bookwyrm with entries that we really don’t want there.)

Is there currently any tool as I described above?